Artificial intelligence and art are an increasingly intertwined space, with AI image generator from text visuals becoming increasingly mainstream. One of the latest innovations in this arena is the text-to-image model, which enables users to create unique images based on written descriptions.

The resulting visuals can have a wide range of applications, from marketing and design concepts to storyboards. The technology is still being developed, though, and it has some behavioral lapses.

Textual Descriptions

A text-to-image model is an AI algorithm that takes a natural language description and produces an image matching that description. These models first emerged in the mid-2010s. As deep learning technologies have advanced, the quality of their output has improved to match or even exceed that of real photos and human-drawn art.

These models use natural language processing technology to interpret the description and computer vision algorithms to analyze and interpret visual data in order to generate artistic visuals. This allows the AI to accurately represent the written word, creating accurate and meaningful charts that are visually compelling.

For example, an AI program called DALL-E created by OpenAI, can take a descriptive sentence like “A small bird with a long orange beak and white belly” and produce an image that matches that description. This is possible because it has been trained on a vast dataset of text-image pairs and can therefore understand the relationship between the concepts and objects described.

Prompts

A good AI prompt is a clear and concise input that guides the AI system towards a desired output. Prompts can take different forms, depending on the task at hand and the specific AI model being used.

For example, if you want the AI to reproduce art in a certain style (e.g. surrealism, symmetry, contemporary) it is important to include that in the prompt. Likewise, if you want the AI to jazz up an image by exaggerating or downplaying some details, it is essential to specify this in the prompt.

The ability to identify linguistic topics and incorporate them into prompts is what separates experienced AI prompt engineers from others. This skill set is a vital part of creating effective AI content and ensuring that the model is performing optimally. It may take several iterations to create a prompt that delivers exactly what you’re looking for. However, the rewards are significant. The right prompt can mean the difference between an image that is realistic and accurate, versus one that looks like it was drawn by a child or has no relevance to your topic.

AI Models

A machine learning model that takes a written description of an object, person or scene and produces a corresponding visual representation. These models have become increasingly capable over the past decade as deep neural networks have improved and learned from vast datasets.

One of the most well-known types of AI is large language models (LLM), which use unsupervised machine learning to learn how human languages work, allowing them to interpret text prompts and produce relevant responses. LLMs are used by many major companies to reduce the time needed for data-heavy tasks, such as reviewing loan applications or detecting fraud.

Another type of AI is a text-to-image model, which converts written descriptions into aesthetically pleasing images or video. These models typically use a sequence-to-sequence architecture to understand the relationship between text inputs and graphical outputs. Examples include GPT-3, the model that powers ChatGPT, as well as OpenAI’s DALL-E. These models produce creative images that combine distinct and unrelated objects in semantically plausible ways.

Results

The DALL-E software, which can make unique visual art from text descriptions, is the brainchild of non-profit AI research group OpenAI. It uses contrastive learning to learn a model of the relationship between language and images. This allows it to create images that accurately match the description. This type of text-to-image AI is not yet ready for general use, however. As described in an open letter by DALL-E developers, a number of behavioral lapses and other shortcomings remain.

The software works by converting text into high-resolution pictures that can be used to convey an idea or mood. This is accomplished using a combination of architectures, including conditional generative adversarial networks and diffuse models. These models rely on an image representation learned by GoogLeNet or character-level CNNs and LSTMs to encode text into a low-resolution picture, then use another deep learning model to upscale that image and fill in finer details. This method is often referred to as zero-shot learning, where the model has never seen the image it’s trying to generate before during training.